The Internet protocol (IP) network is nowadays the universal medium for a multitude of applications and services such as voice-over-IP (VoIP), or digital television (IPTV). It is the federating network that has been adopted by telecommunications operators for implementing various offers of service. For several years, this democratization of the Internet has made the general public one of the preferred targets of telecommunications operators who are ever more numerous in seeking to position themselves in this market segment. This movement has been accompanied by the development of offers of services that are specifically adapted to this customer base, combining several services, thus making use of the advantages of the IP network. These include so-called “multi-service” offers such as “triple play” offers that give access simultaneously to the Internet, to video contents (including broadcast television programs), and to conversational services (telephony over IP), which have captured an increasing share of the market. These offers are usually presented in the form of package deals, and they attract the general public because of rich functionality that is accessible at a reasonable price. Under such circumstances, telecommunications operators are seeking to distinguish themselves from one another by increasing and diversifying the number of services that are available in their “packages”, in order to attract and then retain their customers, in particular general public customers. In this respect, all general public customer profiles constitute potential marketing targets, from young couples to retirees.
One of the factors common to the offers of all of those operators is the installation of a residential gateway, which is also often referred to as a “set top box”, or customer premises equipment (CPE), or a home gateway (HG), and which is often referred to as “gateway” below. Such equipment, installed on the premises of a customer (which may in particular be a home or a business) of a telecommunications operator or of a services provider, is an interconnection element that gives access to the services to which the customer has subscribed and to the applications used by the customer or by the operator for management and supervision purposes. Specifically, as its name indicates, it constitutes a genuine gateway between firstly the network of the services provider or operator and secondly the local network of a customer:                in terms of connectivity—a residential gateway is connected to the operator's network(s) on one side, and on a customer side it provides a set of various interfaces, e.g. a wireless interface such as a wireless local area network (WLAN), or a Bluetooth network, an RJ11 socket for a telephone, RJ45 socket for digital TV and computers, or universal serial bus (USB) sockets;        in terms of services—it makes it possible to manage all of the services to which the customer has subscribed, and the functions that give access to those services: telephony, television, Internet connection, equipment that is connected thereto, network address translator (NAT) rules, firewall rules, etc.; and        in terms of applications—by way of example, it includes software specific to the operator for supplying services to the operator's customers, for diagnostic purposes, or for automatically managing software updates.        
For reasons of concision, it is said below that a gateway “provides” a telecommunications service to the user of the gateway, even though, in fact, the gateway merely enables the user to access the service.
In spite of their ever wider presence within the homes of the general public, for most users such gateways remain pieces of equipment that are poorly controlled or indeed “mysterious”. Worse, once the gateway has been installed on subscribing to the service (assuming that customers perform their own installation), most users no longer takes action on the equipment. As a result, such gateways generally constitute “black boxes” that are poorly known to their users, even though they constitute the central node that gives access to all of the services that users make use of daily.
This poor knowledge even leads to this equipment being held in contempt, often being considered as constituting a pointless extra expense (since the gateway is usually leased to the customer), or as equipment that needs to be restarted electrically if there is a problem affecting any of the services provided by this equipment.
Most gateways have a web interface for configuration and management purposes that is accessible in protected manner via the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). This interface is accessible via a uniform resource locator (URL) that may be in the form of a predefined address (e.g. the IPv4 address “192.168.1.1”, or a specific service name such as “MyBox”); an identifier and a password are generally required to access it in “administrative” mode. Once authenticated, the customer (user) can then access various tools making it is possible to act directly on the services and connections managed by the gateway. Most customers have little knowledge about this administrative interface of the gateway. Furthermore, in order to be able to take advantage of it, a customer must generally be familiar with technical terms used for describing such services, otherwise the customer will not be able to predict exactly the impact of any modifications made using the administrative interface.
In other words, accessing the management elements (even at a basic level) of a gateway requires some minimum level of knowledge on the part of general public customers, thereby necessarily reducing the number of customers who are capable of making use of these functional facilities. Something that may appear from the operator's point of view as a guarantee of security (since the risk of people with little knowledge compromising the system is reduced), simultaneously serves to prevent such people from having means to control simple functions of the gateway.
This ignorance is particularly harmful when better knowledge about the gateway would certainly give customers better control over the operation of the services to which they have subscribed, thereby minimizing any need to call a technical assistance hotline in the event of an observed malfunction (e.g. when the user of a gateway can no longer access any one of the telecommunications services that would normally be accessible via the gateway, or when the level of quality of any one of the services normally accessible via the gateway is degraded compared with its nominal level). Specifically, most basic function, and even advanced functions, can be managed directly using the gateway. Unfortunately, most general public customers do not have sufficient knowledge to be able to manage those functions directly, which leads to an increase in calls to the technical assistance hotline in the event of a malfunction being observed, even though some such malfunctions can easily be solved by acting directly on the gateway. Given the cost to service providers and operators of managing technical assistance services, and ignoring any impact on their image (waiting time, call costs), it is important to put solutions into place that are effective in reducing the number of calls to the technical assistance services of service providers and operators.
The systems presently available to general public customers for restoring service present in particular the following limitations:                managing faults requires the customer to call the service provider or operator in order to indicate that a service is unavailable or degraded; furthermore, if the gateway has become incapable of connecting to the network and if the customer's telephone line is connected to the gateway (as applies with VoIP), the telephone line is unavailable, so the customer cannot use it for calling the technical assistance service;        customers do not know whether the operator has taken action in order to resolve faults that are affecting a service to which they have subscribed;        the time expected to resolve faults is not known in advance; and        the service is unavailable during the time taken by the services provider or the operator to resolve a fault; in this respect, it should be observed that certain operators presently make use of a procedure for lending equipment (e.g. a “3G key”) in order to enable certain customers to continue to access the Internet; this commercial approach has several drawbacks, e.g. the customer must go to a shop, or the customer does not necessarily have access to all of the services that have been subscribed to: specifically the customer then has access only to services that can be obtained directly from access to the Internet; in particular, access to the digital TV service (IPTV) is not guaranteed.        